Vietnamese Language for Travellers: Hello, Thank You and 40 Phrases With Pronunciation

The safest way to say hello in Vietnamese is xin chao (sin chow), and the safest way to say thank you is cam on (gahm uhn). Both work all over the country, with anyone, at any age. Everything else in this guide builds on those two phrases: 40 short, practical sentences with a plain-English reading, a map of the six tones that make Vietnamese sound hard, and the one habit that makes you sound polite, which is adding the right word for "you" after hello.

You do not need Vietnamese to travel in Vietnam, and you certainly do not need it to trek in Sapa, where our guides speak English with guests. But a few words earn a smile in a market, a coffee shop or a homestay kitchen, and they help when a menu has no English. We checked every phrase against Wikivoyage's Vietnamese phrasebook, the vietnam.travel phrases page and other pages on 31 October 2026. Fifteen of the 40 we could not tie to a page, and we mark them with a dagger (†) so you can decide how far to trust them.

Hello in Vietnamese: Xin Chao and the Word for "You"

Vietnamese has no single word for "you". The word you choose depends on how old the person is compared with you, and that choice is the first thing a local hears. The vietnam.travel etiquette page explains the idea, and Wikipedia's article on Vietnamese pronouns gives the words below. A plain xin chao is always acceptable; adding the right word after chao is the courteous upgrade.

So you say chao anh to a man a little older than you, and chao chi to a woman. Locals rarely say "excuse me" to get attention; vietnam.travel gives the example of calling out em oi, anh oi or chi oi to a waiter or shop assistant. If you cannot judge age, ban oi is the safe choice, and a smile does the rest. Many travellers just say xin chao with a small nod, and that is fine.

The Six Tones, Explained Without Jargon

Vietnamese is a tonal language: the same letters mean different things depending on how your voice moves. The Hanoi dialect has six tones, and Wikipedia's article on Vietnamese phonology notes that most other dialects have five, because in the south two of the tones sound the same. You will see the tones as small marks over the vowel. You do not need to master them in a week, but knowing they exist explains why a word you said "perfectly" sometimes gets a puzzled look.

The classic demonstration is the syllable ma. Wikipedia, quoting a Victorian state school curriculum list, gives six different words, one for each tone:

The glosses are from Wikipedia's article on Vietnamese phonology; Wiktionary lists "cheek" first for má and "mother" for southern speech, so we follow it.

Reading Vietnamese Letters Out Loud

Vietnamese uses the Latin alphabet with added marks. Jesuit missionaries began putting the language in Latin letters around 1620, and Alexandre de Rhodes's Dictionarium Annamiticum Lusitanum et Latinum, printed in Rome in 1651, is the first dictionary of the system, according to Wikipedia's article on the Vietnamese alphabet. The French colonial administration enforced it in 1910. That system is called chu quoc ngu, and it is why a visitor can read a menu aloud at all.

Three differences catch English speakers. The letter d with a bar through it, đ, is the hard English "d". Plain d and gi sound like "z" in Hanoi and are closer to "y" in the south, which is why the d in dạ is "zah" in Hanoi and "yah" in the south. And x is an "s". Wikipedia's phonology article adds that northern speakers merge ch and tr, and r is a "z" sound in the north and a rolled sound in the centre and south. You do not need all this; you only need to know that the spelling and the sound are less alike than in English.

North and South: What Changes for a Visitor

Hanoi and Sapa speak the northern dialect; Ho Chi Minh City speaks the southern one. A visitor only needs to notice a few differences, all from Wikipedia's articles on the Vietnamese language, phonology and numerals:

"Thank you" is the same in both regions: Wikivoyage and vietnam.travel both give cam on. Our reading column follows the northern sound, because that is what you will hear from Hanoi to Sapa.

40 Travel Phrases With Pronunciation

Each table below has the English first, then the Vietnamese with its marks, then a plain reading. The reading is our own English-friendly approximation, not a linguistic notation, so it will be close but not exact. Phrases marked † are standard Vietnamese that we could not match to a page we opened; if one matters for your trip, show it written down.

Greetings and manners (1 to 8)

When you do not understand (9 to 12)

Money and shopping (13 to 18)

Food and drink (19 to 26)

For the full list of coffee names and how to ask for less sugar, see our Vietnamese coffee and egg coffee guide. For what to eat once you are in the mountains, see what to eat in Sapa. If you are vegetarian, toi an chay is a good start, and showing the phrase written down helps in a kitchen.

Getting around (27 to 32)

On the trail in Sapa (33 to 38)

Emergencies (39 and 40)

SPEAK A LITTLE ON THE TRAIL

Try Your Phrases With a Local Guide

1-Day Trek

★★★★★4.9 · 312 reviews

Trekking Through Rice Terraced Fields

The Lao Chai to Ta Van valley day, with a local guide and a finish in Sapa town.

Easy

From$35USD

View Tour →

Local Favourite

★★★★★5.0 · 198 reviews

Mountain Views and Villages Trek

Quieter ridge and village trails above the valley.

Easy

From$35USD

View Tour →

Homestay

★★★★★4.9 · 198 reviews

Rice Terraced Fields & Homestay

A night with a local family in the valley.

Easy

From$60USD

View Tour →

Twenty Words You Will See on a Menu

Phrases are useful, but on a menu single words matter more, because menus are lists, not sentences. These are everyday Vietnamese food words from standard dictionary entries; we did not open a separate page for each, so treat the list as a starting point and use your phone camera on anything that matters, such as an allergy.

Combine a word with the phrases above and you can order: pho bo, khong cay is a beef noodle soup, not spicy. Our Vietnam street food by region guide shows what the dishes look like, and our Vietnamese coffee guide goes deeper on the coffee words.

Saying Place Names Out Loud

Place names are the words you will say most often, to a taxi driver, a bus conductor or a guesthouse. Vietnamese names are written as separate syllables, so Sapa appears as Sa Pa on official signs, and the marks tell you how each syllable sounds. Here are the ones you are most likely to need.

When a driver asks "where?", showing the place on your phone map works better than any pronunciation, and in Sapa the guides and homestay hosts will know every village by name. Our Ta Van village guide and Cat Cat village guide show the trails to those two villages.

Seven Signs Worth Knowing

You will see Vietnamese words on doors, bus stops and shop fronts long before you hear a full sentence. Learn these and a street makes more sense.

A Ten-Minute Plan Before You Land

You do not need a course. A small, repeated routine works better than one long study session, and ten minutes a day for a week is enough to say hello, thank you, a price and a coffee order.

Numbers, Prices and the "k" Habit

Prices in Vietnam are said in thousands of dong, and learning to hear numbers is worth more than learning ten other phrases. Wikipedia's article on Vietnamese numerals gives the words below; the readings are ours.

One hundred is mot tram (moht chahm) and one thousand is mot nghin. Vendors and menus often shorten a price to "k", so 50k means 50,000 dong. A vietnamtourism.com page we read through a search summary describes this habit, so treat it as a guide to what you will see, not an official rule. Most meal and coffee prices in Hanoi and Sapa sit between about 20k and 100k, and the Vietnam scams guide shows how to check a price before you pay.

In Sapa: Vietnamese, English and H'mong

Many of the people who live around Sapa belong to ethnic minorities, not the Kinh majority, and speak another language at home. A 2022 article in the journal Moussons (online February 2023), by Mouton, describes the Black Hmong variety, hmoob dub, as spoken notably in the Sapa district of Lao Cai, as part of the Hmong-Mien family, and says White and Black Hmong are mutually intelligible but differ in vocabulary and phonology. Wikipedia places Hmong in the Hmongic branch of that family and counts 1,393,547 Hmong people in Vietnam in the 2019 census.

The two Hmong greetings people search for, nyob zoo (hello) and ua tsaug (thank you), appear in Wikivoyage's Hmong phrasebook, but that page covers the White and Green varieties, not the Black Hmong of Sapa. We could not confirm that the spelling or sound is the same in Sapa, so we do not teach it as the local form. If you want to greet a Black H'mong woman in her own language, ask your guide to teach you; they will be delighted, and you will say it better than any book can show you.

Our guides are Black H'mong and speak English with guests, so you can trek with us in English from the first minute. For the culture behind the clothes and the language, read our Black H'mong culture guide, and for the year's biggest celebration see the Gau Tao festival guide. If you plan to visit a village market, the Sapa Love Market guide explains what happens and when.

Phone Tools When Your Phrases Run Out

Google's help pages say you can download languages for offline use over Wi-Fi and use the camera to translate signs and menus; the camera also works offline once the language is downloaded. Neither page shows a date, and neither page names Vietnamese specifically, so check that Vietnamese is in your list before you leave. A local SIM or eSIM helps if you need translation on the move; see our Vietnam SIM card and eSIM guide.

If a phrase fails, there is a safe fix: smile, point, and show your phone. We found no source for any "common tone mistake" example, so we do not invent one. If you want more guidance on staying comfortable on your own, our solo travel in Vietnam and first-time Vietnam guides go further.

Where Visitors Go Wrong

Three things come up again and again. First, saying a phrase too fast: the tones need time, and a slower sentence is clearer than a quicker one. Second, using the wrong "you": when unsure, ban oi or just xin chao is better than guessing. Third, treating the written word as an enemy: your phone camera and the written phrase in this guide are tools, and using them is not rude.

How We Checked This

We opened these pages on 31 October 2026: Wikipedia's articles on the Vietnamese language, alphabet, phonology, numerals and pronouns, and on the Hmong language and Hmong people; Wikivoyage's Vietnamese and Hmong phrasebooks; vietnam.travel's phrases and etiquette pages; vietnamtourism.com's phrase page (updated 31 October 2026); Wiktionary entries for individual words; the 2022 Moussons article on Black Hmong; and Google's translation help pages.

What we could not confirm: Ethnologue's speaker numbers (the page would not open), the exact Black Hmong greeting used in Sapa, the "k" price shorthand beyond a search summary, and the fifteen † phrases. The readings throughout are ours, not a published pronunciation guide.

For more on the north, see our northern Vietnam travel guide, and to put your new phrases to use in the mountains, our tour list shows every trip.

GEAR RENTAL

Rent at Our Office Before You Trek

Gear Rental

★★★★★ 4.9 · 89 reviews

Trekking Boots Rental

Waterproof ankle-support boots. Cleaned and checked before each rental. Available at 105 Thach Son Street.

$2/Day

From $2 / day

Details Rent Now

Gear Rental

★★★★★ 4.9 · 203 reviews

Walking Poles Rental

Trekking poles available to rent at $2/day at our office, 105 Thach Son Street. Essential for descents.

$2/Day

From $2 / day

Details Rent Now

Frequently Asked Questions